Public Media Platform

The Public Media Platform is an API supporting the discovery and distribution of public media stories. Built in collaboration with the major public media producers, PMP is now managed and supported by NPR's Digital Services.

Digital content from all of the major public media networks--NPR, PBS, PRI, PRX, APM--, as well as many public radio and television stations, can be accessed from one common source, the PMP. Stations and other organizations can now pull this content—using their existing content management systems (CMS)—onto their sites and mobile platforms so that stories from different sources can live side-by-side.

In addition to providing a digital distribution system, the PMP offers business rules and rights management and the tools and applications that make it easy to put content in or pull it out.

The PMP lowers costs for digital distribution by creating an efficient resource for the benefit of all in public media.

The PMP also creates new possibilities for more innovation and future collaboration among those that produce public media, and also allows anyone using the PMP to distribute their content throughout the system.

Ways to Connect

As many of you know, NPR has been working to replace the much loved and used Story API with an enhanced version of the Public Media Platform. Our goal remains--this new API will serve as a central repository for all public media content, including content from NPR, its member stations, and other public media organizations. NPR will utilize this new API for its own digital content distribution, replacing the existing Story API as the technology that distributes content to all digital properties.

We're happy to announce the release of PMP Push capabilities inside of Core Publisher. Starting today, stations using Core Publisher have the ability to enable Push settings for PMP. Enabling this allows station users to choose, on a post by post basis, which stories they want to push up to the PMP.

This represents an exciting step in the integration of Core Publisher with the PMP. Stations have been able to pull content down for some time, but until now have not had an easy way to get Core Publisher content ingested into the PMP.

Producers put their content into the PMP (Public Media Platform)—text, headlines, teasers, and links to multimedia assets like audio files and images. When they add content, they also add additional information that makes the content findable. For example: “this is a Marketplace story on the economy by Kai Ryssdal that is the second story in the June 15, 2015 episode of the program.” Producers can also assign permissions to the content, which allows them to control who can access the story in the PMP.

Content from all five founding partners forms the core of what’s available in the PMP (Public Media Platform), with new sources being added regularly. There are stories, videos, images, and audio from more than 30 programs in the PMP, including Morning Edition, FRONTLINE, and Studio 360. In addition, new content is constantly being added by program producers and stations—anyone who can receive content from the PMP can also distribute theirs through it. The producer manages their own content, making it available to anyone or to specific PMP users.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of new integration services that support the Public Media Platform's goal of making it easier for viewers, listeners and mobile audiences to find and interact with news, cultural and educational content produced by public media. These services - new functionality within Core Publisher and a new PMP Drupal module - allow stations to access and publish PMP content to their websites.

We are pleased to announce that after a significant investment of time by several Public Media entities, the Public Media Platform project has begun. Look for several future announcements on this exciting collaborative media project.